


Heat Wave

by shaenie



Category: The Faculty
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-08-16
Updated: 2003-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:18:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Ohio, it was hot</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat Wave

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/msilverstar/profile)[**msilverstar**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/msilverstar/) for the quickie beta; written for the Iconography challenge, to fit the Icon posted with it.

Globally, everything was all right. All radars, graphs, barometers, and whatnot read normal.

El Nino hadn't reared its ugly head. The ice caps were not melting. Precipitation was not down.

The east coast was comfortable. The west coast was balmy. The Florida Keys were tropical, with a refreshing ocean breeze.

The Midwest was humid and warm, crops planted and thriving in the breadbasket of America.

Alaska was merely cool, rather than frigid, but that was par for the course in August.

Everything was as it should be. Everything was perfectly normal all around the world.

In Ohio, it was hot.

It was hot, and Casey was sweating, which he didn't particularly like to do. His t-shirt clung to his chest and back like a second skin, uncomfortably heavy with moisture. Casey wasn't all that crazy about his first skin, but that didn't necessarily mean he was looking for another one. Not even one bought by Delilah during her frenzied, two-month attempt to remake Casey into a pseudo-acceptable boyfriend. Not even a stylish second skin. No second skin. Thanks for asking.

It was hot, really fucking hot, and the football field really didn't offer much in the way of shade. It was a little overgrown, it being summer, but not much. The grass under Casey's feet wasn't what anyone would term long, by any means.

Because they'd hired someone to maintain things like that over the summer, of course.

Although that sort of confused him, because weren't school maintenance people and janitors and such given the same deal as teachers? Didn't they stay employed during the summer, even though school was out? Why wouldn't they? It didn't make sense to hire someone for nine months, lay him or her off for three, and then hire them again at the start of the new school year.

It didn't make sense, Casey was fairly sure. If they stayed employed, why didn't _they_ cut the grass on the football field? Why didn't _they_ plant flowers and shrubs and trim weeds and paint sheds? Why would they need to hire someone for seasonal work?

Casey had mused aloud about it, but Zeke had slid a calloused palm, damp with sweat (his and Casey's) over Casey's lips, muffling his words, and then his whimpers, and finally his cries.

College, Zeke had told Casey (his shirt had been off, crumpled into a pale grey cotton storm cloud on the ground next to the flagpole, around which Zeke was planting flowers), was like another world.

He had looked at Casey, his eyes squinted almost shut against the brighthotwhite of the Ohio sun, and had repeated it – _another world_ – in his low, gravel-silk voice, dreamy and distant.

Casey had felt a cool thrill of fear along with eddies of hope, ephemeral, like tendrils of blood in clear, cold water. Surreal, though. Acknowledged, but not really real, because it was too hot, too stiflingly, impossibly hot, to really feel anything cool like that. Nothing cool like that could linger in the heat. The sun, the rippling, dense air, the heat of Zeke's breath, and hands, and mouth, quickly burned it away.

Casey thought Zeke was probably right about that.

He knew, at least, that _he_ was not in Zeke's world. That Ohio was not in Zeke's world. He knew because he could see it in Zeke's eyes and hear it in Zeke's voice. Zeke wasn't really present. He was a wraith, a shade. Some kind of half-extant non-creature that tended the grounds at Herrington High during the sweltering summer months, like a memory of what _was_. He didn't exist in any solid way.

Zeke was on hiatus. Zeke was occupying space and occupying hours until life returned to that other world; Zeke's world, now.

When Casey was with Zeke, he felt like he was on hiatus, too. Which made him like the shadow of a shadow.

Casey crossed the blacktop of the track, crisp yellow-orange lines that separated the lanes looking more solid than the spongy, heat-soft surface they were painted on. His sneakers made sticky, ripping sounds on the blacktop's overheated surface. The sun struck that surface and bounced right back up, creating swimmy little disturbances in the air (Casey paused to look at them, because they seemed important, and close, closer than any heat mirage Casey had ever seen, like he could hunker down and dip his fingers into it, feel the way the air was warped and bent by the heat) just above it. In the heat, the tarry smell made Casey feel a little ill.

If he took his shoes off, the bottoms of his feet would be stained black in three steps. He knew it would be hot enough to burn his bare feet, but Casey was tempted to try it anyhow. The blacktop looked almost _wet_. He knew it was just a combination of the swimmy heat ripples and the way the surface felt soft and only semi-solid (the whole world felt like that, in this heat, semi-solid, soft, malleable, like it could slide apart at any moment and reveal something else behind what Casey had always thought of as reality) under the soles of his shoes. He knew that the shine was just a trick of hard, white sunlight on the not-quite-liquid of the tarry substance that the blacktop was made of.

But it _looked_ wet.

Zeke had looked wet when Casey had seen him again, perched incongruously atop a riding lawnmower, which ate the lush green grass in a steadily shrinking square spiral. The longer grass still before Zeke was paler than the dark stubble he was leaving behind him.

Zeke had looked wet because Zeke _had been_ wet. His hair had been dark with sweat (so Casey had assumed); the naked, tanned skin of his back and shoulders had gleamed with it.

He had looked solid, too, in the sunlight. He had cast a shadow on the half-mown verge of the football field.

Casey hadn't recognized his essential lack of substance, then. If he had, maybe he wouldn't have grinned and waved and shouted Zeke's name.

Or maybe he would have.

The parking lot isn't blacktop. It's something more solid, harder, with chips and bits of actual rock in it, crushed up with some other, unidentifiable stuff. Was this cement or concrete? What was the difference, exactly?

Whatever it was, it made Casey squint as he crossed it. It caught the sun in its shinier bits and chips, and sent it careening upward at weird angles, spangling Casey's jeans with reflected, disco-ball dapples of light, shooting light like lasers into Casey's eyes, creating dazzling, negative-exposure bubbles in Casey's vision.

Casey sped up a little. No more than a fast walk, though, because Casey didn't run unless he was being chased – and sometimes not even then – and also because it was too hot to run. Running in this kind of heat was suicidally stupid. The air was heavy; it weighed you down, rested on your legs so that they couldn't rise any higher than what was necessary for a quick walk. It rested on your lungs so that they couldn't manage more than shallow inhalations, barely enough to maintain minimal consciousness (like the weight of Zeke's sweaty-slick body on top of Casey, like the feel of Zeke's mouth above his, pulling the air from Casey's lungs in little, helpless cries).

Casey could hear Zeke (tonk, tonk, tonk, like he was hammering or something, something that almost certainly required too much effort in this heat), but couldn't see him yet.

That was the opposite of the day on the lawnmower. Casey had been able to _see_ Zeke (smiling, hand shading his face as he looked toward Casey, torso twisted so that he could keep Casey in his line of sight as he turned in his ever-decreasing, rectangular orbit), but the sound of the riding mower had drowned out Zeke's voice.

It had been hot, but Casey doesn't think it had been _this_ hot, then.

It definitely hadn't been this hot that night, even though Zeke's garage wasn't air-conditioned. That night there had been a breeze through the open windows, and there had been ice-cold beer and ice-cold nerves.

No, it hadn't been this hot, even when Zeke had touched him, even when Zeke had peeled Casey's sweaty shirt off of Casey's body, even when Zeke had pressed his rough palm to Casey and murmured that Casey was beautiful, and Zeke's mouth had tasted like clean water, and Zeke's skin had tasted like salt water, like the ocean, and Casey's blood had pounded in his ears like tides.

It seemed to Casey like every day was getting hotter, like it was only a matter of time before the air was too hot to breathe, too hot and heavy to allow any kind of movement at all.

Casey knew that paper burned spontaneously at 451 degrees, thanks to American Lit, and he wondered how hot it had to be for flesh to burn like that, just sizzle and spark and burst into blue-yellow-orange flame.

He wondered if it was possible for that to happen from the inside out. Starting, maybe, with a persons _mind_. He wondered if his mind was burning.

Zeke was naked to the waist, and Casey figured he should be used to seeing that by now, but it still made the air around Zeke seem to do that heat-shimmer thing, like space around Zeke was bowed and altered to accommodate him, creating little twists, like motion lines in still comic strips. Casey was pretty sure that was all in his head, but that knowledge hadn't stopped it from happening every time he saw Zeke with his shirt off.

Casey couldn't remember if he'd ever seen that rippling distortion around Zeke _before_. It seemed like something he should remember.

He watched Zeke arm sweat off his forehead, watched the muscles of Zeke's back flex and pull gently as he bent, retrieving a liter-sized bottle of water, watched the bobbing of Zeke's Adam's apple as Zeke tipped his head back, swallow swallow swallow.

The muscles between Casey's shoulder blades seemed unnaturally tight, his spine felt so rigid it could snap in half.

Zeke looked over at him, smiling, blinding white like the sun beaming out of the golden angles and planes of Zeke's tanned face. Heat rolled in Casey's belly, and melted the tension between his shoulder blades, softened his spine.

Casey couldn't remember if he'd felt heat there when he had looked at Zeke _before_ , either.

It wasn't any cooler in the shade of the tool shed. The sun itself wasn't visible, eclipsed by the drab, colorless wood of the building, but it could still be felt, heating the air so that it pressed in on Casey, stole his breath, though it was possible that most of the heat was coming from Zeke's skin, that the pressing was coming from Zeke's body, that the breathlessness was a result of Zeke's mouth on Casey's.

He wondered how hot Zeke would be if Casey had him hold a thermometer in his mouth. He wondered if he would watch the mercury slowly rise up the hollow center of the glass tube until it filled the bubble at the tip. He wondered if the bubble would eventually crack and break from the pressure, like it did in cartoons, and dribble viscous, precious poison down the outside of the glass.

He wondered how much mercury it would take to kill someone.

He wondered if mercury would have any effect on Zeke.

Afterward, Casey drank water from Zeke's bottle. It was sun-warmed, like the air, but it _felt_ cool and perfect sliding down Casey's throat.

He lay naked and slick with sweat; no breeze to cool his skin, baking, even in the acute triangle of shade provided by the shed, eyes closed, sun-hot and languid. He could feel heat coming off of Zeke, too, naked beside him.

He wasn't surprised when Zeke whispered that it was nearly time to go. Zeke's breath fanned hot against Casey's collarbone when Zeke whispered a question, the one Casey had been waiting for, afraid to hear, and afraid he wouldn't be asked.

It was hot, but not hot enough to stop him from turning into Zeke, pushing against him, feeling Zeke's arms and Zeke's heat curl around him, feeling Zeke's lips on his neck trailing upward, licking away sweat, teeth gentlesharp on his earlobe.

Casey kept his eyes closed, and wondered why they'd even bothered with MaryBeth at all.


End file.
